


Wild Civility

by oubliance



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: M/M, Neutrois Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 22:59:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oubliance/pseuds/oubliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>A sweet disorder in the dress</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Kindles in clothes a wantonness.</i>
  <br/>
  <a href="http://www.tracemyip.org/"></a>
  <br/>
  <img/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wild Civility

**Author's Note:**

> Potentially triggering for transphobia; the opinions expressed by characters herein are non-authorial.

‘What are you doing?’ Danton says.

And like a butterfly, Camille is stricken; he is ashen-faced at once, while the words hang in the warm air between them. He tries to gain his balance, clutching at the chiffonier behind him but not daring to turn away from Georges-Jacques: nor even to break their conjoined gaze.

Danton feels a dragging heaviness in his stomach at the depravity before him, and he tells himself that this – right now – is disgust. Camille has gone too far. He steps forward and plucks him away from the furniture, taking the small, pliable body into his custody. Camille’s arm, his elbow, his hand: Danton has to shift his grip because every touch unsettles him further. The hand is wet, frozen, as if Camille had been out in a winter rainstorm, rather than safely alone on a June day, in Danton’s bedroom – or more pertinently, in Gabrielle’s. Yet if Camille is frightened, it’s his own fault, Danton thinks. Nobody, he tells himself, would sanction this.

On the other side of the bedroom door, the servant’s song finishes and her footsteps recede. Now he’ll hit me, Camille thinks. And a flinch pulls his whole body inwards – he can’t help it – and since he knows already that he won’t be able to get away, he finds his head turning of its own accord so that the blow will strike his jaw or his cheek, not his eye.

Danton swallows. ‘This is – you can’t do this,’ he says. ‘The baby died. She’s not here because the baby _died_ , you know that.’ He touches Camille’s face: not wanting to be awed, but caught up as he always is by that astonishing arrangement of skin over bone, and by the damp lashes. He won’t permit Camille to shrink like this, no matter how scared.

Camille’s answer has died in his throat, like an animal without sufficient air. He feels almost non-existent in the great clasps of Georges-Jacques’s hands, as his friend draws him towards the bed. Danton sits, placing Camille between his open legs, holding him tightly, and Camille thinks, I might be sick, right onto his coat. He closes his eyes. It’s like being at school again, where you commit some dreadful crime: and it’s half because you want to, but half because there doesn’t seem to be a choice. There, too, they’d make you wait sometimes, exactly as Georges-Jacques is –

‘You’re not my wife,’ Danton says, and he hears trepidation in his own voice, salting his anger. He pulls Camille closer, closer. ‘You’re not a – ’

Camille says desperately, ‘No, no. I’m not, I was only trying – ’ The silk is sticking to his body all over, it clings to his thighs, his ribs, his arms.

Danton’s fingers are tugging at the buttons, but they’re so small he can hardly get a grip. The bodice, though, hangs loose, gaping above the red sash that swathes his friend’s waist. He pushes in his hand, strokes the flat chest, finds Camille’s nipple and pinches.

‘The most you can aspire to,’ he says, ‘At best, is to be a girl-child.’ Camille mews with pain but he doesn’t let go, not yet. ‘And I don’t fuck children.’ He tugs at the sash, its weak knot unravels and it slips to the floor. Without it, the dress is more like a canopy, drowning its occupant in silk. Danton tears at the skirts, dragging them up in filmy handfuls, until he finds Camille’s bare, cold legs.

Camille thinks that he is more naked now than if he’d taken off his breeches a hundred times over: but that’s his last thought. Georges-Jacques’s hand travels up the inside of his thigh – almost tentatively, as though a change in garb might have transfigured Camille’s body – and it’s enough, perhaps too much. The little death comes over him like an angry, too-sweet mist.

Minutes later, he is half-standing, half-lying against Georges-Jacques and his skin hasn’t lost its chill. Camille opens his eyes for a moment – fulfilment has never stopped him from being afraid – and examines the scarred face as if the object of his gaze is a vista renowned for its sublimity: and as if his vision, suddenly, is without a flaw. Gabrielle’s skirt is stained with seed, and Georges-Jacques does not understand at all. Camille slides to his knees in a billow of silk. Love’s hands are buried in his chest, driving his heart on with a tiny whip.

*

_A winning wave, deserving note,_  
 _In the tempestuous petticoat;_  
 _A careless shoe-string, in whose tie_  
 _I see a wild civility:_  
 _Do more bewitch me, than when art_  
 _Is too precise in every part._


End file.
